The Soul of the Boy Sitting Next to Me
by CliveLive49
Summary: 'Life's been a pain. I've been a pain. It's all been one big pain. Bye now. Gregory House.' Warnings: DEATH!FIC, Major character death, suicide
1. Chapter 1

Prologue

The light in the hotel room is dim, stained red by the closed curtains. It's the middle of the day, and it's scorching outside. In here, the air conditioner is on full blast, pumping out cool, dry breath that smells like clean linen and leaves a strange taste in your mouth.

'Wilson,' says House, unzipping a carryall and rummaging inside, 'I left your toothbrush at the last place, so you'll have to borrow mine tonight.'

On the bed, Wilson shifts and makes a pained noise.

'Yeah,' says House. 'I know. It's hard cheese. You'll have to catch my germs. I'll get you a new one tomorrow.'

House contemplates the bags, and then decides against unpacking. He simply takes out Wilson's vials of morphine and syringe and throws them into the bedside table drawer. Then he collapses on his own musty single bed, toeing off his sneakers. He finds the TV remote on the bedside table.

There's nothing on. He looks for Pay Per View Porn, and finds something not-quite-vanilla but not-quite-kinky.

'Wilson,' he says, softly. 'You're missing porn.'

Wilson makes another pained noise.

House looks over at him, and realises that he won't need to buy that new toothbrush, after all.

It's very quiet, the last hour or so. Almost silent, in fact, apart from Wilson's death rattle. Which sounds like a door creaking closed, ever so slowly.

After this - after he's checked for vital signs once, twice, three times, his fingers against Wilson's cold wrist, carotid, nostrils - House sits on the edge of the bed and looks at Wilson for twenty minutes.

First, he looks into Wilson's open eyes. Long and hard. Searching for the dead husk of any great revelation or answer. There's nothing. He closes Wilson's left eyelid, and leaves it like that for a moment, posed in a frozen wink. He laughs, softly, but a little hysterically. Then he closes the other eyelid.

He looks at the rest of Wilson. His sunken cheeks, the hair follicles large and dark against the translucent pale, the lank strands of stubble dark, and artificial-looking, like they've been poked in with a crochet hook. Wilson's nose doesn't look like Wilson's nose any more. The flesh has collapsed a little around the bone structure - it's lost its proper shape. The skin on his bare arms, too, visible where his pyjama sleeves are rolled up, seems to have sagged - fallen away from the skeleton to pool against the mattress. It's as though his entire body has deflated with that last croaking breath.

Something has gone. Something intangible. Something unnameable has slipped out of Wilson, in that very last moment.

House has seen countless people die before, in countless different circumstances. Though he's never noticed this subtle change.

No. House doesn't believe in a soul.

But the closest he's come, is with Wilson. There was something - that unnameable thing that was in Wilson, and now isn't - that resonated with the same thing inside House. It was like... It was like walkie talkies. One inside Wilson, one inside him. Tuned only to the frequency of each other. And he could hear Wilson through his walkie talkie, all the time – his soft voice, whispering the fact of his presence in the world. Wherever he went. Wherever Wilson went. Even with hundreds of miles between them. And now it's gone. House knows, because he's flicking through the channels and the frequencies, and he can't find Wilson's. All he gets is static.

After a minute of contemplation, he undoes the buttons of Wilson's pyjama top and spreads it to bare his chest. The dusting of hairs between Wilson's nipples look wilted. His happy trail looks sad.

House pulls down Wilson's pyjama pants. He's mildly surprised to see that Wilson's prick is half-hard. With the rest of him so limp, it looks almost comical. He's heard of this happening, at the moment of death, though he's never actually seen it. Not on one of the seventy-two corpses he's autopsied in his time.

He knows it's a perfectly natural, explicable phenomenon. Still, it creeps him out a little.

House gets up from the bed, sits down at the desk and opens up his laptop. He powers it up and opens a page in the Word Processor. Then he types the following:

_Dear Miscellaneous People Of My Past And Present Acquaintance,_

_If you care enough to read this, it's likely you fall into one of three categories:_

_I've hideously offended you at some point in the past, and you've sought out the details of my demise in order to gain some small satisfaction from the fact of my death and some insight into the psychology of a man who could be so needlessly cruel. To this demographic I would like to apologise. Not for offending you, but for the fact that this letter will sorely disappoint you._

_You believed you knew me in life, and disliked me intensely. However, deep down, you sensed in me some glimmer of Goodness, Hope and Love for Mankind. You either made some futile attempt to help me realise this, or harboured fantasies of doing so at some indeterminate future date. To these people I would like to say: you are morons._

_You are the DI investigating my apparent suicide. To you I would like to say - I was murdered, murdered, I tell you. You want to look for a small, bald man, with unpleasant, beady eyes and egotistical delusions about migraine medication. Goes by the name of Von Lieberman._

_Life's been a pain. I've been a pain. It's all been one big pain._

_Bye now._

_Gregory House._

_P.S. Please bury me in my Howlin' Wolf t-shirt._

House leaves this window open on his laptop, and then crosses to the bedside table to pick up the phone. He dials 911, and says to the operator, quite calmly,

'Hurry, please. The blood. There's so much blood.' He gives the address of their hotel room. It's a risk. It gives him very little time to get things done. Then again, he doesn't want Wilson to lie rotting in a motel room for days, even if it is well air-conditioned. He, himself, couldn't really care less. He hangs up, opens the bedside table drawer and takes out the remaining three vials of Wilson's morphine.

He carefully fills a syringe with seven times the lethal dose and sits on the edge of the bed. He tugs off one of Wilson's long grey socks and ties it around his own lower bicep as a tourniquet. Smacks the crook of his arm until a fat blue vein raises on the surface. Then he injects himself with the entire contents of the syringe, undoes the sock, and replaces it carefully on Wilson's foot.

He lies down beside Wilson. Takes him by the shoulders and drags him a little closer. He doesn't embrace him, but he does roll him onto his side, so that they are face-to-face, very close. Wilson's chest is still bare, and his pants are still around his knees. The tip of his naked prick is just touching House's knee. House watches as his own shallow breaths stir Wilson's nose hair.

'Let me tell you what I did today,' he says to Wilson. 'I had a good day. I've been having more and more good days, lately. I finalised some plans for the future. I spent a lot of time deep in thought. Reassessed things. I think I came to a reasonable decision.'

A giddy, sick, euphoric feeling rises in House. He remembers it - it's the feeling you get when you're about to orgasm, and you don't want to orgasm, because the moment afterwards, when the sensation slips away from you, is so sad.

'Wilson,' he says, and waits for a second, as though to make sure he has Wilson's attention. 'This is stupid.'

He thinks he hears Wilson's reply, creeping sibilant through the air vent above the bed. Though he can't make out the words.


	2. Chapter 2

1.

The moment House wakes, he's sucked back under the surface.

The surface of what, he's not sure at first. It's soft, and it's solid, and it shifts around him unnervingly, with every movement of every limb. It's dark. He can't see a thing. He can't breathe.

He's very aware that his leg still hurts.

He begins to kick, slightly panicked, clawing his way upwards, slowly, through the stifling blackness.

Until he breaks into a strange half-light, with a heaving breath, looking about him in perplexity.

He is in a ball pool.

A pool of giant tennis balls.

_Well_, thinks House. _This is unexpected._

He can't seem to think anything beyond this. He can't remember much about how he got here. He remembers an air vent, and a half-hard cock, and two walkie talkies. He feels lost. He has the sense that someone is searching for him.

He starts to slide back down beneath the surface of the balls, and begins to kick again, treading water, after a fashion,

Above the balls, there's a vast, empty sky, the colour of sunset, though he can't see the sun. There aren't any landmarks, that he can see. He squirms in a circle - makes a full revolution, and when he returns to his original position, there is a door in front of him.

The door stands on a spongey platform – a plastic-coated block, like one you might find in a soft play area. It's shiny red.

Suddenly he feels movement reverberate through the balls to his right. He whips his head around, and –

No. It's nothing.

For a moment, he was sure. He was sure he saw a dark-haired head, floppy fringe, pale face, bob up from the surface of the balls, and disappear again.

He scrambles through the balls in that direction. Begins to dig through them, throwing them behind him, though with nothing to rest his feet on, he begins to sink again. In any case, he finds no one.

When he looks back, the door is still there.

He recognises it. It's the door to 221B Baker Street. He grabs at the edge of the platform and heaves himself up.

The door opens without a key, and he steps inside.

2.

The flat is almost as he remembers it. Subtle things, however, are different. His Robert Johnson Gibson Acoustic Guitar is green, not brown. The piano is facing the wrong way. The walls are a different colour. Not the garish purple that Alvie once daubed on them - just a very slightly darker shade of magnolia than they used to be.

He can hear the low hum of traffic outside, and, he's sure, the very faint crackle of radio static.

Though he can't see a radio anywhere. He certainly never owned one.

He makes his way to the kitchen, down the hallway that's a little longer than it should be.

He opens the fridge. It's stacked with beer bottles. He takes one out. The label is plain white, and reads, in a black, sans-serif font,

DRINK ME.

He does. Though come to think of it, he already feels drunk. Not giddy, or happy, or tipsy. He's swimming in that unpleasant stage of intoxication – the stage when you begin to lose control, to feel unreal, and vulnerable, and still sober enough to be completely aware of it. He drinks the whole beer, and still, he doesn't push through into the warm, pseudo-contented stage that should follow it. He drinks another. Still, he feels the same.

He opens the ice box. It's full of frozen pizzas.

He tries to microwave one, but the microwave won't work. He sucks it frozen. He's ravenous.

He doesn't know why, but he feels dirty. Itchy. As though a fine layer of filth has settled on his skin. He decides to take a shower, and opens the airing cupboard to get his terry cloth robe. He lets out a sharp, horrified shout and slams the door shut again.

Then, more cautiously, with a nauseated curiosity, he slowly opens it once more.

There, on the shelves, folded quite neatly, like towels, stacked in threes, are a number of still, blue, naked infants.

They're bent at the hips, their tiny heads nestled between their straight legs.

Trembling slightly, House reads the tag tied to the leg of the child nearest his right elbow.

WHATSHISNAME.

House walks quietly and calmly into the bathroom, gets down onto his knees, lifts the toilet lid and vomits violently into the bowl. It's bitter as it comes up - bitter and substantial, hitting the water with loud smacks. It takes him a second to identify the taste, and notice that the water is swimming with a hundred specks of white.

He's vomiting Vicodin.

And he finally admits it to himself. He says it aloud.

'I think I might be dead.'


	3. Chapter 3

3.

He decides not to take the shower after all.

Instead, he goes back into the living room and opens the curtains. He can't think why he hasn't yet checked what time of day it is.

As it turns out, it's that strange state of twilight that it was in the ball pool. He closes the curtains again against the pink-orange glow. Though it's still vaguely threatening, knowing it's out there. It reminds him of the light from a fire, in the distance, with the accompanying quiet worry that it's your loved one's house that's burning.

He sits on the couch.

The thing that galls him the most about all this, is that he was wrong.

There is Something More. Some continued consciousness. Something after The End. Wilson was right. The bastard. It's funny, but it hasn't even occurred to House that this might be a hallucination. A drug-addled fantasy. A dream before dying. Because he knows, as surely as he knew the answer to every puzzle presented him in life, that this is none of these things.

He knows with a resounding certainty that he is dead.

He takes some small comfort from the fact that he isn't in Heaven. Wherever he is, he's sure it's not what _Wilson_ envisioned when he thought of the Afterlife.

Wilson.

The thought of him makes his stomach tighten. The thought of that makes him aware that he still has feeling, physicality – a body. Pain. There's pain in his leg, as gnawing and white-hot as it was in life. He stands up and drops his trousers. The scar's still there, twisting its way through his flesh in the same sardonic smile. His hands are the same. Down to the guitar string calluses on the first three fingertips of his left hand. Seized by curiosity, he snatches a letter opener from the pen pot on the dresser to his left, and drags its point in a firm line, three inches long, along the underside of his forearm. For a moment or two, the line is a neat white scratch. Then it wells up with fat beads of blood along its length, like rubies on a bracelet string.

His trousers still around his knees, he sits back on the couch, and acknowledges something else.

He's hard.

Rock hard. Harder than he can ever remember. He feels himself throbbing, hot and insistent, ready and desperate. He wants to take off his boxers. He daren't.

He doesn't know why. Somehow this doesn't seem like an appropriate circumstance to jerk off.

Still. He can't help but feel it. Heavy there, between his legs, screaming at him for the tight warmth of his palm.

The television looks inviting, though he can't find the remote. He thrusts his hand down the back of the couch cushions in search of it, and feels a surge of triumph when his fingers impact something solid and rectangular.

When he pulls it out, he sees that it isn't the remote.

It's a walkie talkie.

There's a small 'On/Off' switch on its underside. He turns it to 'On.'

It begins to give out a low, threatening snake-hiss of static. He listens carefully. There's nothing else. So he presses the 'Speak' button and says into the receiver,

'Testing.' Nothing. 'Testing. Is anyone there?'

Still, nothing.

'Hello,' he says, more insistently. 'Can anyone hear me?'

When still there comes no reply, he ponders for a minute, and then tries,

'Wilson?'

Several more seconds of static. And then, small, but unmistakable.

A voice.

'...Hear me?' it says. At first, House thinks it's an echo of his own message. But he's sure that the voice isn't his. Though it's familiar.

'Wilson!' he tries again. 'Wilson, is that you?'

'...Are you?' says the voice. Though it's faint, and wandering lost in a cloud of crackles, House can hear that it's excited. Hard-edged with the nervous energy of triumph. 'Looking for... thought you'd... something!'

'It is you!' shouts House, unable to disguise his thrill and relief. 'Wilson – it's you, right? Wilson. It's awful here. Where are you?'

'...Need you to tell me...'

'What? Wilson. Wilson. I can't hear you.' Suddenly at a loss for what to say, House blurts, 'The microwave doesn't work!' Then he falls silent, feeling rather foolish.

'Give me your... find you. Listen.'

'I am listening!' he shouts back. 'I just can't hear everything you're saying. You listen – listen. Wilson. I'm in my apartment. Come and get me.'

'...Think...'

'Wilson.' He's panting now, cold and trembling with the thrill of the connection, the fear of losing it. 'Come and get me.'

There's no answer.

House shouts into the walkie talkie for another half an hour. Entreaties, demands and, finally, obscenities.

Then he gives up, and places the walkie talkie on the coffee table, leaving it on, hissing away to itself.


End file.
